Challenge brief and description of uncovered functionalities

Once selected and confirmed, the challenge and procurement will be described in detail to ensure, when published, a full understanding and comparability of the competing solutions proposed by the market in view of potential conversion into permanent services. The description of the need will involve, again, those are daily involved within the public service delivery chain and, ultimately, the final users of the innovation. The brainstorming and focus group sessions are, also here, effective ways to ask them to define their needs for innovation in terms of functional and performance requirements, without identifying a specific solution, to encourage the market to the active generation of application ideas and technological choices, including divergent and alternative ones, though equivalent from the point of view of performance. The opportunity to do not pre-define the technical solution and to open to alternative technical ways to address the needs expressed in functional and performance based requirements, doesn’t mean to define the need in general and short terms. This will be a crucial point, as the only way in which solutions will meet their performance targets and expected behaviours is for them to be specified upfront, clearly and unambiguously. Following our experience, it is a simple fact that if functions and performances are not a stated criterion of the solution requirements then the product designers will generally not consider (strictly) performance issues. At the same time, in order to pre-determine a wide potential market (public and private) for the new solutions developed or acquired, enabling the desired economies of scale and cost savings, it will be extremely important not to fall into the hyper-description of the desired solution, avoiding customization and personalization and preferring the standardization of solutions, through requests for interoperability and scalability. To describe a need in functional and performance terms, we will combine multiple and already tested methodologies and approaches. A good synthesis, that combines the LT-TLC and FAST methods, has been developed and implemented in Lombardy Region to conduct the PCP pilot. As innovation procurement is about the total cost of ownership and not the lowest price per piece, it will be extremely crucial to direct innovation towards the entire life-cycle of the solution. In this regards, the method LT-TLC (long-term and total life-cycle performance description) will creates associations between descriptive functions and quantified performance targets and will classify functions and related performances along the solution life-cycle phases: production, delivery, installation, use, management, maintenance and disposal in order to address high long-term performance and (total life-cycle) costs as low as possible. The other relevant methodology that we will use to elicit the functional specifications is called FAST (Functional Analysis System Technique). According to this methodology the basic element of a system is the Function that describes the original intent or purpose that a product, process or service expected to be performed. The description of a Function is restricted to a two words format: Active Verb + Measurable Name. The Verb is used to answer to the question: What does it do? While the Name is used to answer to the question: What does the Verb apply to?